I stare at it—a statue of a woman a few inches taller than my hand is long. She's wrapped in a midnight blue robe, with a hood that cowls her head, except for a thick braid of black hair curled on her brow. Gilt-edged and flowing in folds, the robe is brocaded with floral figures—red, orange, yellow, green, brown, all fringed with gold. Lustrous skin is exposed on her toes, peeping beneath the hem of the robe, on her wrists, aroxmd the left of which is a gold bracelet, on her hands and fingers, the right clasping a gold scroll, the left lying across her right palm, on her breast, upon which inside a deep decolletage hangs a gold necklace, and on her throat and face. Wing-shaped eyebrows and birdlike pupils are coal black. Consonant with the repose of the woman's hands is the otherworldly serenity in her face.
I'm astonished that a piece of porcelain should survive intact the bombing that has utterly destroyed a city. And I'm stunned that it's been thrust into my hands by hands emerging from a crater dug by a bomb dropped from a plane I may have tallied as it lifted off from, and, if lucky, destruction accomplished, landed back on the flight deck of one of the carriers my ship was protecting.
After gazing with rapt attention and, I hope, evident admiration, I shift my eyes to the eyes in the pits of the skull. They seem no more alive than the eyes of the porcelain woman. Uncertain what this skeleton, who is doubtless exhibiting a, perhaps the only, valuable he still possesses, is asking of me, I smile with all the good will I can project without words, then extend the figurine back to its owner. Instead of accepting it, he points his forefinger at his mouth, and, after rettirning the V-ed fingers to his lips, draws hard on an imagined cigarette and blows imagined smoke from puckered lips. Again he holds up the five fingers of his other hand.
"Now I get you," I mutter to myself, nodding to acknowledge I've caught on and at the same time shooting up three fingers of my left hand. Still the skeleton holds up five fingers. Tucking my thumb against my palm, I counter by showing him four fingers.
"Ho-geh," comes from the gray lips in a high-pitched voice, more a retch than a moan. I'm surprised this foreign apparition, my vanquished enemy, knows what those two syllables of English mean, can roughly approximate their sound, and has already learned the protocols of trafficking with the conquerors. The realization that what might well be a precious heirloom is being bartered for cigarettes suddenly hits me.
Bending over, I work three packs of Lucky Strikes out of the inside of my left sock, one from inside my right. All are sealed. I don't smoke. Following the lead of my shipmates, I've bought a carton of cigarettes at the canteen in the fantail and stowed inside my socks, for use as illegal tender, six packs, the limit the duty officer inspecting the liberty party of enlisted men mustered on the quarterdeck will pretend not to know I'm concealing. Looting and trading for booty are being winked at.
Hands that form a stone-like begging bowl receive eighty Lucky Strikes in exchange for the figurine. Seconds after the bony torso and skull have descended into their underworld home, the tin scrapes its way across the open top of the crater. As I wander on through the wasteland, feeling less guilt than I know I ought, I can't prevent myself from wondering about the value of my plunder in U.S. dollars.
Noticing some jagged remains of walls off in the distance, I steer myself toward them. It seems I'm on a lane through a suburb, heading out of the city. As I draw close, I can see the walls are yellow brick, unexpected in that to this point I've happened on no brick debris. Across from what's the shattered remains of this building of considerable size, stands a frame house, more like a cottage than a shanty. It looks intact. In front of it is a knee-high bamboo fence with a gate. Behind the fence, as though prisoners of war, five emaciated human beings, clearly parents and children, are lined up.
As I approach they don't retreat but stare at me silently. The father finally nods. Lifting the front of the jumper of my whites, I slip from the pocket of my bell-bottoms a thin bar of Hershey's milk chocolate, which, also bought at the ship's canteen, I've brought along as a pick-me-up. Over the fence I offer the candy to the father, who, bowing as he accepts it, hands it to the mother. Carefully she tears off the wrapper, breaking the bar into squares two at a time, and gives them to each of the three children. She holds onto the two left over. The way the children devour the chocolate makes me wish I had the power to turn one Hershey's bar into five thousand.
Bending again, I remove one of the two packs of Lucky Strikes that remain in my right sock and hand the cigarettes to the father, who accepts them with another bow. At that instant the terrible irony that resides in the brand name hits me. For three or four seconds I close my eyes, an involuntary expression of gratitude that the man I'm offering the "Luckies" to won't understand. Remembering that I've stowed a book of matches I carried off from the bar of a cocktail lounge named Lou Yee Chai's in Wakiki, when we'd been moored in Pearl Harbor for a few days on our way to the battle zone, I pull it from the pocket of my bell-bottoms. The matchbook had replaced a condom, which I'd used losing my virginity to a prostitute I'd picked up with the matches. She'd told me she was Japanese-Hawaiian.
Seeing the matches, the man breaks open the pack, pounds out a cigarette and offers it to me. When I shake my head, he tenders it to his wife, who also shakes her head. I strike a match, cup my hands over it, and carry the fire to the tip of the cigarette the man is holding between his lips. The formality being observed on both sides gives me the feeling I'm participating in a ceremony.
"I have much gratitude to you," the man says after exhaling a cloud of smoke. His voice is surprisingly deep for so small a body, his accent more British than American.
Astonished at hearing the man's words, I blurt out, "Do you speak English?"
"A little, badly."
"Your pronunciation is fine." Trying not to sound condescending while wondering whether the man would know the word "pronunciation " I translate my compliment. "You speak very well."
The man shakes his head and smiles between deep draws on his cigarette. When he hands the Lucky Strike pack back to me, I hold up my hand and say, "No, no. You please keep it."
The mother, I notice, gives the two remaining squares of the chocolate bar to the youngest, a girl of five or six.
I'm feeling ill at ease. Turning toward the city behind me, I sweep my eyes along the line where the rain meets the horizon. As I return to the man, I see his face in a cloud of smoke he's just exhaling.
"Very bad," I say. Trying to look and sound somber, sincere and apologetic, I slowly shake my head.
"Americans are so big," the man says quickly. He's no more than five feet three or four, very slight.
"I'm not one of the big ones," I, five feet eight and a well-fed hundred and sixty pounds, reply. "Is Yokohama a very large city?" It's an honest question in that all I know of the place we've destroyed is its name. While waiting for an answer, I realize that to be scrupulous I ought to have used the past tense.
"Well, yes," the man answers. "Very big city."
"Your home has not been damaged."
"Oh no. Very lucky." So he knows the word after all. But he couldn't possibly comprehend the ironic meaning of "strike." "Many times the bombs are falling near."
"That building across the road, it was large?" I spread my arms wide, then turn my palms in, as if trying to encompass it.
The man nods, blowing smoke.
"Made of bricks." I point to the closest section of the remains of a wall.
Again the man nods.
"Was it a factory?"
The man shakes his head.
"What was it?"
The man hesitates. Then with what seems to me to be obvious reluctance says, "This was school. There I teach students English. But I speak badly. I read more better."
"Was anyone inside? Were children killed when.. " Coward that I am, I trail off.
"No, no. Children all gone." As I breathe a sigh of relief, he adds, "But many people killed "
"Who? What kind of people?"
The man draws h
ard on his cigarette, holds the smoke in his lungs for what seems minutes, then slowly lets it out. It's evident he's loath to go on. I try to encourage him by lifting my eyebrows inquisitively.
"Was hospital people. Sick from bombs and fires. Too, doctors and nurses."
"Why was the school..." I break off, realizing the question I've begun has an evident answer. "Because more hospitals were needed."
Slowly the man nods. "No more hospitals in Yokohama."
I become aware I'm biting my lip, uncertain whether to prevent myself from crying sorrow or shouting anger. I've no more chocolate to sweeten what can't be sweetened. The man's pinching the stub of his cigarette. Get out of here, I tell myself. As I'm about to say good-bye, the mother speaks to her husband. To me her hoarse voice seems to be chanting. When the man replies sharply, pointing to the ruin of the building, she raises her voice to a shout.
"Forgive, please. She is my wife and cannot know how is the war."
The woman begins to shriek. Her husband jerks up his free hand, palm close to her face. She stops as if her throat had been cut.
"What is she saying?"
The man throws down his cigarette butt, grinds it into the ground with his toe, and stares at it.
"Tell me, please, I want to know."
"She say I must say to you the bombs come during the sunlight. Three times. Many people die." Raising his eyes, he looks directly into mine.
Silence. I close my eyes and drop my head as in prayer, and something between a sigh and a soft whistle escapes me. A scream from the woman makes me open my eyes and snap up my head. As the man slowly nods his head, the woman stops screaming.
"She say I must tell very big red crosses were painted on the roof."
I reach down, extract the remaining pack of Lucky Strikes from my right sock and thrust it into the man's hand. Bowing again, he accepts it.
Without a good-bye I turn and start walking back down the lane, then strike out across the pitted and debris-strewn landscape that had been Yokohama, in the direction I think will lead me to the waterfront. I keep altering my course and twice I have to backtrack. There are no vertical landmarks.
While waiting on the shattered dock for the arrival of the landing craft that will ferry the congregating liberty party back to our ship, I survey the devastation along the coastline. I can identify nothing intact enough to serve as functioning shore batteries or antiaircraft installations. Between us and the armada anchored in the bay, a dozen or so battered and burned warships, some capsized, some half-submerged, remind me of the wrecks of eight battleships and some smaller vessels I'd seen when we lay moored in Pearl Harbor.
All at once a brawny bosun's mate grabs a rifle from the top of a stack and slings it over his shoulder by its leather strap.
" 'Tain't loot. No way. Just a souvenir for my boys back home," he drawls in a deep-South voice. "What the fuck, we beat the shit out of the little bastards, didn't we?"
Shoving and pushing hands commence grabbing rifles that are theirs by the ancient right of conquest and sling them over their shoulders. I edge my way in, seize one, and yank it out. It's heavy, a good twelve pounds, I judge, and looks as if its kick would dislocate your shoulder. Certain it's antiquated compared to the nine-pound Garands the marines aboard ship carry, I guess it's modeled on the German Mauser of World War I vintage.
Burdened with what I've plundered, an obsolescent rifle slung over my left shoulder and a porcelain figurine clutched in my left hand, I shuffle into the landing craft, which ferries me across the bay on what appears to be much the same course that carried the Japanese diplomats to sign the document of their surrender. After climbing the ladder affixed to the hull of my ship, I report myself back aboard. The duty officer on the quarterdeck looks the other way as he returns my sloppy salute.
#
After reliving his "liberty" (the grotesquerie of the unintentional irony of military nomenclature!) in what had been the city of Yokohama, he felt as though he'd walked across the desolate surface of the moon. Or through the vestibule of Hell.
#
When they entered the bar for their before-dinner cocktails, Yuko Miyataka was sitting alone in the inglenook, drinking whatever she'd ordered from the bartender. She looked to be perfectly comfortable with the procedures of the inn. Alma immediately went up to her while he requested two martinis.
"She'd be pleased to," Alma reported as she sat down across the low table from him. "Really, Dan, she's a very sociable person. With poise and self-assurance. You wouldn't have discomposed her, I'm sure."
Contrary to their custom of sipping, he gulped down his martini. Ordered another, for both of them. When he'd finished his second, Alma's was standing on the table beside her still unfinished first drink.
"Alma, what say we have a third this evening?" Occasionally they did what they knew was imprudent—certain to increase his insomnia and leave both of them hung over the next morning. Usually there was a celebratory pretext. Or one of them was feeling depressed. The amount of gin they'd indulge in to elevate their spirits, he well knew, would depress him hours later.
"You have the blahs?"
"Not at all." He wasn't lying, just being deceptive. Again. With Alma. What he did have was quite different and far worse than the blahs. "We're here on a lark to avoid, aren't we? Seems to me to justify a bit of self-indulgence. Since now we know the worst, we might as well live it up."
"You're right. It's worse to be a hypocrite than own up to opting out, going fugitive."
"Would you mind ordering? I want to run back up to the room and change shirts," he explained. This was an outright lie. At the sound of the word "fugitive" he'd winced inwardly. That Alma wasn't aware of the immense difference between the context and significance that prompted her to use the word hypocrite and the place where and the force with which it hit him, made him feel cowardly as well as hypocritical. "There's a tab inside the back of the collar of this shirt that's rubbing my neck and annoying the hell out of me. Give me a few minutes. Why not sit with Yuko Miyataka and I'll join you in the dining room? We can drink the third martini at our table. Order soup and fish of the day for me."
To his ear the excuse he'd invented carried little plausibility. Even over a seeming trifle Alma gave him all the ground he asked for.
Once he'd turned the corner of the barroom, he hurried to the stairwell, ascended two steps at a time, and raced down the hallway to their bedroom. Unbuckling his briefcase, he drew out a sheaf of graying pulpy sheets. He hadn't let Alma know that, compelled as he'd recently become to revisit his life during World War n, before they'd taken off for Yorkshire he'd crawled into the eaves of their home and removed the seven-page history of the ship he'd served on, from the bottom drawer of a mahogany sea chest that had been in his father's family for generations.
The document was entitled
DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY, OFFICE OF NAVAL RECORDS
AND HISTORY, SHIPS' HISTORIES BRANCH
Stenciled 28 March 1949, it had been compiled and signed by one Howard Sigler, Officer in Charge, Journalist, USN. Driven by an urgency to read again— the first and only time had been more than half a century ago, when he'd begun to write, then had quickly given up on, a novel tentatively entitled "The Battle for the Sea of Peace"—a factual account of what he'd participated in, he'd marked passages and underlined sentences. Although rereading had done nothing for his peace of mind, he'd stashed the mimeographed typescript in his briefcase the morning they'd left home, for... he really didn't know why.
Thumbing through to locate his markings, he stopped in the middle of the last paragraph on page four.
Operations were resumed on 8 June with a final assault on Kyushu, but Japanese air strength was so depleted that only 29 planes were located and destroyed.
He flipped the page. His eye jumped to the second paragraph.
Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet carrier forces, now the greatest mass of sea power ever assembled, steamed northward on 1 July to wage a tremendous
pre-invasion campaign of destruction against every Japanese facility which could be used for prolonging the war.... No attempt was made to conceal the location of the fleet. On the 15th we participated in the bombardment of Muroranu Hokaido. wrecking steel mills and oil facilities in the city. On the 17th, our sixteen-inch guns blasted the Hitachi Mito area on the Honshu coast, northeast of Tokyo. In this bombardment British battleships joined those of our fleet, all units shelling the Japanese homeland at will without opposition.
The underscored passage ended with
The Yokosuka Naval Base in Tokyo Bay received the carrier planes' attention [a chilling euphemism, he thought] next day and one of two remaining Jap battleships, NAGATO, was placed out of action. On 24 and 25 July the Inland Sea area between the main islands of Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku was visited with special attention to the Kure Naval Base, where six major fleet units were badly damaged and 258,000 tons of naval shipping were either sunk or put out of action. This was the end of Japanese sea power.
Up from somewhere in his brain leaped the fact that the destroyer Callaghan, the last ship to be sunk by a kamikaze, was hit during the night of July 28, nine days before Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. Perhaps this perversely celebratory event had been niched in his memory because that July the 28th was his twentieth birthday.
Dropping the pages, he sat with his head in his hands. In his mind he added to the resume of what he'd been part of, the unimaginable death and destruction dealt to Japanese military personnel and facilities, factories, and cities, with their civilian population, by B-29's, to say nothing of the losses in air and at sea, including planes and airmen suicidally gone.
With their navy and air force destroyed, he asked himself, would a fleet of fishing boats have stood off "the greatest mass of sea power ever assembled," as it bombarded the coast of Japan in preparation for the massive invasion the Japanese knew was coming? Or would the shark-cleaned bones of drowned sailors have grown new flesh, repaired the blasted and burned-out wrecks of their ships lying on the sea bottom and brought them up from the deep to drive off the attacking naval and air forces?